Dreadnought's Scale of Progression Aims to Match the Scale of Its Ships
Of the many power fantasies popular videogames allow us to explore, one has had a surprisingly tough time breaking into the mainstream: that of piloting a giant spaceship in battles with other giant spaceships.
An MMO like Eve: Online might tap into this desire, though hopes of an immersive, harrowing experience might be dashed by its mercantile systems and mid-combat statistical calculations. Alternatively, newer space-set MOBAs like Fractured Space might eventually scratch players’ collective cruiser-controlling itch, but at the moment this is still a niche space in games yet to be definitively conquered. Enter Yager Development, who aim to conquer such a space with Dreadnought, their free-to-play, long-in-beta title for PC and PlayStation 4.
Yager is best known for their 2012 military shooter, Spec Ops: The Line, which one might recognize as the furthest conceptual thing from a giant spaceship combat sim. Peter Holzapfel, Dreadnought’s director who joined Yager in 2013, claims Spec Ops was important inspiration in the conception of the spaceship game; he says the goal was to create another accessible shooter with a major twist, à la Spec Ops. In this case, Dreadnought’s “twist” would simply be that the player controls a giant spaceship instead of a soldier. “Though it’s not as obvious,” he explained, “[Dreadnought] is a similar beast because in essence it’s a shooter, but it’s a shooter with giant spaceships.”
When he casually made this comparison to me and a handful of other journalists, my immediate reaction was that it was just marketing spin, if not outright bullshit than at least a promotional line that the game itself would only thinly support. However, once I got my hands on the game, I realized I was making too much of the analogy. I should have better tried to absorb its general sentiment: Dreadnought is a genuinely novel shooter, too.
The first thing to suggest Holzapfel’s comparison might be apt was just how familiar many of the game’s basics felt. As soon as we launched into a training round I picked a pre-made tank-equivalent class, sprinted (boosted) into battle, took cover behind large objects and aimed with the left trigger while firing with the right. It was like I was in high school again, playing a straightforward online FPS, only I was navigating a massive 360-degree space and cautiously managing my Destroyer’s energy consumption. Next, we jumped into a live game of Team Deathmatch mostly populated by participants of Dreadnought’s closed beta.
